Hokusai and Hiroshige

by Hokusai Katsushika

By the 1800s, when the artists Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige lived and worked, commoners enjoyed the numerous amenities of Edo (Tokyo), the world's largest city (pop. ca. 800,000). They launched businesses, perfected crafts, gained leisure time and literacy, traveled a coherent system of safe roads, and enjoyed art, poetry, a seemingly limitless taste for novelty, and the income to indulge them. Ukiyo-e prints - 'pictures of the floating world' - reflect the lives of the Edo commoners. In Hokusai's and Hiroshige's prints, we see the faces of this new middle class, both the...

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